We take a boomer for a cruise. We learn to fire ballistic missiles. We listen to shrimp. We learn not to poke at anything bearing one of those little radioactive symbols.

"Running navigation lights but no bright lights," confirms Voorhees as he peers through one of the sub's two periscopes.

"Tentatively identified as U.S. warship, believed U.S.S. Curts," says the sonar operator with such fluid confidence that he must surely have anticipated the question. Except that when Voorhees asks him in quick succession about Masters Five, Two, and Six, the replies are equally instantaneous and include new information, such as the location of a cruise ship at anchor 28,000 yards distant. That's 16 miles.

For the duration of this exchange, the control room is "rigged for red" – bathed in a blood-like glow that preserves night vision and precludes telltale illumination snaking its way up a periscope to reveal the sub's presence. The sonar operators huddle amid their own otherworldly gloom in a cramped corridor ahead of the control room, their faces painted green by the glow of six CRTs, their ears clamped by bulky headphones. They're listening for man-made sounds. "The whir of fine machinery – like an electric motor on fine bearings – that's usually a warship," says one. "But a clunketta-clunketta, that'll be a merchant." They can hear rain. They can hear bubbles bleeding from their own ballast tanks. They can hear helicopters, light planes, and fishing skiffs. "Plus, there are always biologics to listen to. You know, fish, whales, shrimp." He hands me the headphones, on which I hear only a few clicks resembling an Ameritech long-distance call. "But if you suddenly hear nothing where biologics oughtta be, then you have to ask, Did something big scare all the fish away, something we should worry about?"

No matter how deep the sub dives -- and it can allegedly descend to 1640 feet -- the Alaska will never willingly pass closer than 4000 yards, or 2.3 miles, to a surface vessel. "One of our jobs is to help [the CO] steer clear," explains a rookie sonar operator. "We're like air-traffic controllers, 'cept we don't know where the surface craft are headed, plus we can't ask 'em to move."

As it submerges, the Alaska releases a 2000-foot whip antenna that floats to the surface, receiving low-frequency radio bursts from as far inland as Omaha. If the right series of three-letter codes arrives – a so-called Emergency Action Message – Voorhees will order an ascent to periscope depth, about 75 feet, then raise a communications mast. In less than three minutes, he can receive 40 pages of confirming data, including the combinations to three safes holding the keys necessary to fire ballistic missiles. With that in hand, the captain will take the Alaska to "hovering conditions" – a depth of about 150 feet and a tortoise-slow pace of 1.5 knots – from which the sub's Trident D5s can be fired.

Each is a weapon right out of a Jules Verne delirium: seven feet in diameter, four-and-a-half stories tall, 130,000 pounds, a range of 6900 miles. At the apogee of each missile's route – just as it goes suborbital – it will release 14 separate 150-kiloton "bomblets." If the Alaska were to unleash her complement of two dozen missiles, she'd have slung skyward more firepower than has been expended in any war in history. "Those missiles don't rely on terrain mapping to find their targets," reminds a weapons officer. "That's because – and I don't mean for this to sound morbid – we'll already have so drastically rearranged the enemy's terrain."